Deep Cuts #1 | Hi’s and Skydives

Hi everyone, welcome to the first post of Deep Cuts! Since increasing the amount of content from three times a week to nine times a week I’ve noticed that having the content that’s solely made up of reviews is…kinda boring. So I’ve decided that every now and then I will contribute to the content by writing about whatever comes to mind, whether it be something I’ve done or a gig I’ve attended or something that annoys me about the “biz” of being a music blogger. That way I feel like I’m able to show off that I’m a human and not some robot programmed to say that this album is good or not so good.

As you probably could tell by the painfully obvious title I went skydiving this past weekend! We were initially going to do it back in June but unfortunately the arrival of some clouds meant that we couldn’t. That sucked as it meant we spent £250 to sit in a field in Kent before leaving disappointed. What also sucked was having a couple of beers and some Burger King afterwards, only to become best friends with the toilet a couple hours later due to a dodgy Whopper. Definitely not the experience I wanted, but at least I finally got it on Saturday, August 6th, strapped to a guy named Si, screaming my face off.

The proposition came about from a good friend of mine turning 21 and wishing to replicate exactly what his older brother did, which resulted in falling out of the sky for a minute or so. One thing I’ve noticed about myself is that being asked to do something like this months in advance results in me immediately saying yes because “it’s ages away” before eventually hating myself with about a week to go.

We arrived at Headcorn in Kent around 1pm after a two hour drive complete with friends sticking their feet out the windows and getting hyped up through the medium of listening to Black Eyed Peas’ first album and blowing our voices by shouting ‘My Humps’ as loud as possible. After four hours of waiting around and becoming tremendously sunburnt we were finally ready to go get kitted up to go do some falling with style. We got ourselves kitted up and I met my instructor Si, who was possibly the most laid back dude in the world, who had handed over a sweet baby blue skydiving suit which helped me stand out from the rest of the squad.

After about twenty minutes, the plane we were all crammed in reached the 12,000ft mark and everything that followed was a complete blur. I watched on as two of my friends approached the opening of the plane and disappeared a second later like a fly caught in the wind, and then it was my turn. I was absolutely bricking it (my palms are sweating just reliving it now) as Si announced that we were going to head to the edge, and then further more into the edge before finally ditching the plane.

Holy balls, it was mental. I have never experienced a feeling as terrifying as the initial falling out of the plane did. We span and flipped in the air before I finally realised that hey, this is fucking scary and proceeded to scream. A lot. Fortunately we reached terminal velocity and things soon calmed down and felt a little less plummeting-to-my-death and more steadily-gliding-to-the-ground, which at this point allowed me to really take in the whole section of Earth I was seeing. It was beautiful. France was in that direction, Dover in the opposite while windmills and rivers and markets and old castles scattered everything in-between.

The adrenaline rush washed over me enough for the toxins of anxiety to flood away which allowed me to properly take in everything that was in view. Once we started descending to the ground it was crazy how good the whole thing felt, and being able to go from screaming my head off to high fiving Si at the end was dead good.

I’ve come out of it feeling invincible and like I can do anything I set my mind to which is something that rarely ever happens considering how much I’m usually trapped within the constraints of anxiety I am. It was an incredible experience and I implore all of you to try it out yourself. If you don’t enjoy it, at least you can say you said the F word at 12,000ft in the air.

So…Skydiving is certainly something everybody needs to do in their life at least once. I hope you enjoyed this little personal blog post and liked having something a little different to read on this website for once. Let me know what you think of having Deep Cuts being a semi-regular series and I’ll make sure to keep it up. Thank you for reading, love you.